Apart from the initial pause at the end of May after the Chinese "safeguards" had been proclaimed, the market shows no signs of having been seriously distorted, and in fact the region has absorbed increased supplies of coil from outside without showing signs of oversupply. Within Taiwan and Korea rising demand has kept pressure on their domestic suppliers and driven prices up. China Steel Corp (CSC) is marking up third quarter coil prices by the equivalent of 35-44 dollars/t, and has agreed to a similar rise in its contracts to purchase slab from Japanese mills (up to 250,000 tonnes) for third quarter delivery. Posco is also expected to announce rises for domestic customers.It is a measure of how far market conditions have changed in Taiwan that announcement of a 7-10 day maintenance closure in late June at Yieh Loong raised fears of a shortage of re-roll coil among the non-integrated galvanising lines on the island. The company, a CSC affiliate, has no steelmaking capacity and uses the slab procured by CSC to roll up to 180,000 tpm of HR coil. The maintenance break will lose no more than 40,000 tonnes in late June, and CSC has reassured customers that it will use group resources to meet normal order levels during the closure. Two quarters ago the CSC affiliate had reduced its requirement for imported Japanese slab because of HR coil oversupply.
展开▼
